No Longer For Sale - Now Free!

The OPEN LOOK and XView Documentation and Source Code CD was
a large but affordable collection of mostly-free software,
focussing primarily on OPEN LOOK, XView, and the NeWS Window System.
OPEN LOOK is a very good specification for a Graphical User Interface,
or GUI, primarily popular on the UNIX and Linux operating systems.
XView is an easy-to-use toolkit for writing OPEN LOOK programs
under the X Window System. NeWS was Sun's Network extensible Window
System, a faster, lighter-weight window system alternative to X.
NeWS was designed by James Gosling, who later designed the
Java Programming Language.
Under the Common Open Systems Environment process, OPEN LOOK
was "phased out", though it was at the time still actively used, both inside Sun and
by their customers, and in the Linux and other free-software communities.
And under competition from Display PostScript, the
NeWS window system was also abandoned by Sun. We simply chose to
provide a single source for all publicly-available material related to them.

Many people think that OPEN LOOK is a better GUI than (say) Motif.
That's purely a matter of opinion, of course, but it's ours, and many
share it. There are some good human-factors reasons why OPEN LOOK is
more "intuitive." As well, the XView toolkit was the first free-software
commercial-quality toolkit for developing full-scale X applications, and
is widely used in the Sun and Linux communities (this is not to
disparage Tk, QT or GTK, which came later).

Where to get it now?

The declining use of XView lead to a drop in sales of the CD.
It is still
listed on Amazon
and occasionally copies turn up there. However, meanwhile,
I have open sourced it! Here's where to get the material:

GitHub: Most of the documents, and the X-related program files, from the original CD-ROM image file
(about 250 MB) are now archived
on github.com.